14 September 2011

Brooding, sophisticated and drop-dead gorgeous, Drive is lowbrow trash rewrit as highbrow treasure. Its clumsy coincidences, unnaturalistic expository dialogue and pulpy themes—vengeance, sacrifice, redemption—are brought to life with elegance and gravitas: it's the action movie treated like art, the cinematic equivalent of literary genre fiction. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed mechanic with sidelines as both stuntman and getaway driver. He's a stoic loner steeped in Jean-Pierre Melvillean melancholy, possessed of preternatural driving abilities, capable of both honorable service and shocking barbarity.

At the same time, director Nicolas Winding Refn has said, "I've always wanted to remake [Sixteen Candles] in one way or another and, in a very unlikely way, I've done that in Drive." The movie switches between two tones: the world-weary and the romantic.

When I describe the plot of Restless, Gus Van Sant's sweet new movie about the paucity of time, the finality of death, and the small measures of love that give our short lives meaning, try not to roll your eyes. Ok, yes, it's about two teenagers who meet cute at a memorial service—she as a guest, he as a crasher, like Harold and Maude without the age discrepancy—and, yes, she has a terminal illness and he has a best friend who's the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. But, despite this dangerous level of whimsy—compounded by a Danny Elfman score—Restless succeeds thanks to its winsome leads, black comedy and irreverent spirit. Plus, it'll make you cry.

Though tearjerker would be the wrong word because of its pejorative implication. Restless earns your tears, eschewing in favor of charisma the emotional manipulation that typically mars movies about death-disrupted puppy love, from Love Story to A Walk to Remember.

09 September 2011

The alarmist Contagion is the apotheosis of our germophobic age of hand sanitizer. From its repulsed series of shots of people making contact with each other or manhandling water glasses, I learned that no one should never touch anyone or anything, especially their own faces. That's how disease spreads, and diseases are like nature's weapons of mass destruction. (You saw The Happening, right?) This pathological aphephobia fits in well with a global culture in which relationships and socialization are increasingly moving on-line; the one relationship in the movie that blossoms does so through text messages. Physical contact can be fatal—our fingers may as well be made of knives—but nobody ever caught chiropteran swine flu from Facebook. (You'll excuse all the scientific terminology as half of this movie's all-star cast plays doctors and speaks in jargon-heavy dialogue.) "Our best defense," Laurence Fishburn's character says, "is social distancing." And yet Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns don't put much faith in virtual realities, as the film's "blogger"—the modern iteration of your archetypal shoe-leather newshound—comes off almost as bad as the contagious disease itself...

If I think of horror movies set on lakes, I think of Friday the 13th and I Spit on Your Grave. Shark Night 3D takes place on a lake, a shark-infested saltwater lake, and it feels like a blend of those two precedents: like the former, the villain is a preternatural predator—nature's boogeyman, the shark; like the latter, the real bad guys are actually a few violent, perverted and crudely racist good ol' boys. The sharks are their minions, physical manifestations of their bigotry, sexual violence, and class insecurities. They're true monsters.

And a band of college-aged archetypes are their quarry, spending their mid-semester recess at a friend's Louisiana lakeside/sharkside house—there's The Nerd, The Jock, The Gamer and The Black Guy; The Slut, The Latina and The Virgin, each a total hottie. (This is PG-13, so the topless ladies are always seen up to their necks in water or with their backs to the camera; The Nerd has a muscled physique and chiseled features, but he wears glasses.)

It's not NASA that launches Apollo 18's secret title-mission—it's the department of defense, signaling that this is no mere movie about the space shuttle program (however serendipitously timed to its demise). It's instead about the noble sacrifice honorable volunteers make for their country—on the orders of craven, corrupt civilians in control of our national (and intergalactic) safety. The movie's three astronauts are, unbeknownst to themselves, American soldiers in space. Their enemy? Killer spiders from the moon.

There was a time when a movie with space poison-spreading arachnids would have taken its name from them, but Apollo 18 borrows instead from its conspiratorial revisionism.

In the Safdies' previous features, The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs, the brothers depicted Manhattan with detail as rich as an early Law & Order episode—not just its gritty streetscapes and local "characters" but also its marginal ephemera, on which they let their cameras linger: classic New York moments with hobos, hoods and hot dog vendors. The Safdies' mastery of these authentic-seeming asides comes from years of real-life wanderings through the city's fringes, with eyes and ears open—and camera at the ready.

Buttons is a two-part compilation of seconds-long "found films"by the brothers and their longtime friend Alex Kalman, shot on pocket cameras over nine years of Bloomberg mayoralty. They're the kind of arbitrarily captured moments of people-just-being-people you might stumble across on YouTube, here stitched together with brightly colored title cards (Private Idaho style).

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a Gothic haunted-house movie (or a haunted Gothic-house movie?) that very, very closely follows the tropes established by all of its forebears (if we're listing some, don't forget The Orphanage, also produced by Guillermo del Toro)—except its monsters are super campy but its tone is super serious, like Gremlins without a single wink or smile. What a huge mistake. Anyway, what relevance do haunted-house movies have now? If there's a modicum of intelligence in their design, they can't help but comment on our housing situation, right? If this movie does any business—and that's a big "if"—it'll probably be because it tapped into Americans' new fears of their homes, brought on by the foreclosure crisis. In this remake, the house—or, rather, its hell-deep foundation (the mortgage?)—tears its family apart, but also brings it closer together, much like a defaulted loan can, depending on the circumstances.